A Fortune-Teller Told Me (8 page)

Slowly, as if he did not want to hurry our relationship, the blind man began whispering something. My assistant translated. It was the usual question, to which I gave the usual reply: “I was born in Florence, Italy, on September 14, 1938, at about eight in the evening.”

He seemed satisfied, and began performing some strange calculations with his fingers in the air. His sightless eyes, still raised to heaven, brightened as if he had a great secret with which to capture my attention. His lips whispered a sort of nonsense rhyme, but he said nothing intelligible. A Chinese girl in white pajamas ran in, handed something to his wife and dashed off, first joining her hands over her bosom in salutation to all the impassive ones on the altar. An old clock on the wall ticked for long minutes. I had the impression that the blind man was searching for something in his memory, and had found it.

At long last his mouth opened.
“The day you were born was a Wednesday!”
he announced, as if he expected to surprise me. (Right. Bravo! A few years ago he might have impressed many people with that calculation, done entirely by memory. Now it seemed much less impressive. My computer does the same thing in a few seconds.) His satisfaction was touching, but I was disappointed and my interest flagged. I listened to him absentmindedly.
“You have a good life, a healthy body and a lively mind, but a very bad character,”
he said.
“You are capable of great anger, but you are also able to calm down quickly.”
Generalities, likely to be true for anyone sitting before him, I thought.
“Your mind is never still, you are always thinking about something, which is not good. You are very generous to others.”
Again, true for almost anyone, I told myself.

I had placed a small tape recorder on the table, and took notes as well, but I suspected I was wasting my time. Then I heard the woman translate:
“When you were a child you were very ill, and if your parents had not given you away to another family you would not have survived.”
My curiosity revived: true, as a small child I was not very healthy. We were poor, it was wartime and we had little to eat; I had lung trouble, anemia, swollen glands.
“From the age of seven to twelve you did well at school, but you were often ill and you moved house. From seventeen to
twenty-seven you had to study and work at the same time. You have a very good brain, capable of solving various problems, and now you have no worries because you studied engineering. From the age of twenty-four to twenty-nine you went through the most unhappy period of your life. Then everything went better.”

It is true that as a child I was often ill, but not that I began working at seventeen. It is not true that we moved house, but the years between twenty-four and twenty-nine were the most unhappy of my life: I had a job with Olivetti, and thought of nothing but getting away, but did not know how. As for engineering, I studied law.

I was not impressed: it looked like a typical case, where the fortune-teller’s pronouncements have a fifty-fifty chance of being true. My mind wandered. I looked at his hands, which were caressing the turtle shell on the desk. I heard his continuous whispered calculations, like a computer sifting its memory. Obviously he was mentally shuffling cards. But perhaps his real strength was instinct. Being blind, not distracted by the sight of all the things that distracted me, perhaps he was able to concentrate, to sense the person he had before him. Perhaps his instinct told him that my attention was wandering, because he suddenly broke off the singsong recital.

“I’ve bad news for you,”
he said. For an instant I was worried. Was he going to warn me about flying?
“You’ll never be rich. You’ll always have enough money to live, but never will you become rich. That is certain,”
he declared.

I almost laughed. Here we were, in the middle of the Chinese city where everyone’s dream is to become rich, where the greatest curse is just what the fortune-teller had told me. For the people here it really would be bad news, but not for me: becoming rich has never been my aim.

Well then, what would interest me? I asked myself, continuing my silent mental dialogue with the blind man. If I do not want to be rich, what would I like to be? The answer had just taken shape in my head when it came to me from him, still reading his invisible computer.
“Famous. Yes. You’ll never become rich, but between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two you will become famous.”

“But how?” I asked instinctively, this time aloud.

The translation had hardly reached him when he lifted his hands
and, with a widening smile on his lips, began tapping an imaginary typewriter in midair.
“By writing!”

Extraordinary! The blind man could of course guess that anyone sitting before him would like to be famous, but what gave him the idea that I might do so by writing? Why not by starring in a film, say? Had I perhaps told him? Told him mentally, in no actual language—there was none we had in common—but in that language of gestures comprehensible to anyone who could … see?

Unconsciously, internally, at the very moment when I asked, “But how?” I answered the question and mentally made the gesture of a hand that wrote. Could it be that the blind man “read” this gesture and immediately repeated it with his hands? Is there any other explanation of this brief sequence?

He felt that he had regained my attention, and continued.
“Until the age of seventy-two you’ll have a good life. After seventy-three you’ll have to rest, and you’ll reach the age of seventy-eight. From now on never try your hand at any business dealings or you’ll lose every penny. If you want to start something new, if you want to live in another country, you must absolutely do it next year.”

Business is something I have never thought about. As for changing countries, I knew I wanted to go and live in India, but definitely not before May 1995, when my contract with
Der Spiegel
and the lease on the Turtle House were due to expire. And then? It would depend on various circumstances if I could then move. To go next year was impossible, in any case.

“Be careful; this year isn’t good for your health,”
said the blind man. Then he stopped and did some more calculations with his fingers in the air.
“No, no, the worst is over. You were through with all that was bad at the beginning of September of last year.”

At this point it seemed only right to let him know why I had come to him, and to tell him about the prophecy of the Hong Kong fortune-teller. The blind man burst out laughing, and said,
“No, definitely not. The dangerous year was 1991; you did then indeed risk death in a plane.”
He was not mistaken. I shuddered at the memory of all the ghastly planes in which I had flown that summer of 1991 in the Soviet Union, when I was working on my book
Goodnight, Mister Lenin
.

For a moment I had a sense of disappointment. Perhaps it was only
because he knew I was firm in my resolve not to fly that he saw no danger in the future. As I told myself this, I realized how readily the mind will perform any somersault to rationalize what suits it.

We thanked the man, paid, and left. In the little square we found the limousine with the driver in his fine white uniform. “Well?” the woman asked me. I did not know what to say. The strangest thing the blind man had told me was that as a child my real parents had given me to another family, and that only thanks to this had I survived. What a risk he took in saying such a thing! In the vast majority of cases it cannot be true, as it was not true in mine. Or perhaps it was? The Oriental Hotel’s car inched slowly through the traffic; my thoughts flew rapidly and delightfully in every direction.

There can be no doubt that I am my mother’s son. Where else would I have got this potato nose, which has reemerged identically in my daughter? Yet it is equally true that in a certain sense I have never belonged to the family I grew up in. I felt this from an early age, and my relatives recognized it too, jokingly saying to my father: “But that one, where did you ever dig him out from?”

The blind man had got the facts wrong, but he had hit on something profoundly true. One only had to interpret, to focus on that part of us that goes beyond our physical being, and ask where it comes from. In my case it does indeed come from “another family,” that is to say from another source than the genes that determine the shape of my nose, my eyes, and even certain gestures which now, the older I grow, I recognize more and more as those of my paternal grandfather.

In the tenor of my parents’ ways there was not so much as a germ of the life I have lived up till now. Both of them came from poor, magnificently simple people. Calm people, close to the earth, chiefly concerned with survival—never restless or adventurous, never looking for novelty as I have always done since childhood. On my mother’s side they were peasants who had always worked other people’s land; on my father’s side, stonecutters in a quarry that is still called by their name. For centuries the Terzanis have chiseled the paving stones of Florence, and—it was said—those of the Palazzo Pitti. Nobody in either family had ever gone regularly to school, and my mother and father’s generation was the first that had learned, barely, to read and write.

Where then did I get my longing to see the world, my fetish for
printed paper, my love of books, and above all that burning desire to leave Florence, to travel, to go to the ends of the earth? Where did I get this yearning for always being somewhere else? Certainly not from my parents, with their deep roots in the city where they were born and grew up, which they had left only once, for their honeymoon in Prato—ten miles from the
duomo
.

Among all my relatives there was not one to whom I could look for inspiration, to whom I could turn for advice. The only ones I felt indebted to were my father and mother, who I saw literally go without food to allow me to study after primary school. What my father earned never lasted to the end of the month, and I well remember how sometimes, holding my mother’s hand and trying not to be seen by anyone who knew us, I would go with her to the pawnbroker in the Via Palazzuolo with a linen sheet from her trousseau. Even the money for a notebook was a worry, and my first long trousers—new corduroy ones, good for summer and winter, indispensable for secondary school—were bought by installments. Every month we would go to the shop to hand over the amount due. It is hard to imagine today, but the pleasure of putting on those trousers is one I have never felt again with any other garment, not even those made to measure for me in Peking by Mao’s own tailor.

As I grew up I had a great affection for my family and its history, but I never felt any real affinity for them—as if I really had been put there by accident. My relatives were irritated by the fact that I studied and did not start working at a very young age, as they had all done. A brother of my father’s, who dropped in every evening before dinner, used to say: “What’s he done today, the layabout?” Then he would trot out the wisecrack that so offended my mother: “If he carries on like this he’ll go farther than Annibale!” Annibale was a cousin, another Terzani, who had gone far indeed. Since boyhood he had worked as a city street cleaner, walking the tram tracks with a spade and rake to clear away the horse droppings.

Why did I practically flee from home when I was fifteen, to go and wash dishes all over Europe? Why, when I arrived in Asia, did I feel so much at home that I stayed there? Why does the heat of the tropics not tire me? Why do I sit cross-legged without discomfort? Is it the charm of the exotic? The wish to get as far away as possible from the povertystricken
world of my childhood? Perhaps. Or perhaps the blind man was right, if he meant that something in me—not my body, which I certainly got from my parents, but something else—came from another source, that brought with it a baggage of old yearnings and homesickness for latitudes known to me in some life before this one.

Slumped in the backseat of the Oriental Hotel’s car, I let these thoughts whirl around in my head, and amused myself by chasing them as if they were not mine. Could it be that I believed in reincarnation? I had never thought seriously about it. But why not? Why not imagine life as a relay race in which, like the baton that passes from hand to hand, something not physical, not definable, something like a collection of memories, a store of experiences lived elsewhere, passes from body to body and from death to death, and all the while grows and expands, gathering wisdom and advancing toward that state of grace that concludes every life: toward illumination, in Buddhist terms? That would help to explain my difference from the Terzani clan, and to interpret the blind man’s statement that as a child I was passed from one family to another.

At times we all have the disquieting sensation of having already experienced something that we know is in fact happening for the first time, of having already been in a place where we are sure we have never set foot. Where does this feeling of
déjà vu
come from? From a “before”? That would surely be the easiest explanation. And where have I been, if there is a “before”? Perhaps somewhere in Asia, an Asia without concrete, without skyscrapers, without superhighways. So I pondered as I watched the dull, gray streets of Bangkok as they slid past the window, suffocated by the exhaust of thousands and thousands of cars.

My interpreter lived on the outskirts of the city, and I had offered to see her home. The car entered a bit of motorway I did not know. “A very dangerous stretch, this,” she said. “People die here all the time. Do you see those cars?” In the shadows of an underpass I saw two strange vans with Thai writing on them, and some men in blue overalls standing nearby. “The body snatchers,” said the woman. It was the first time I had heard the word in Bangkok. The story behind it was grisly.

According to popular belief, when a person dies violently his spirit does not rest in peace. And if, in the moment of death, the body is mutilated, decapitated, crushed or torn to pieces, that spirit becomes particularly
restless; unless the prescribed rites are quickly performed it goes to join the enormous army of “wandering spirits.” These spirits, along with the evil
phii
, constitute one of the great problems of today’s Bangkok. Hence the importance of the “body snatchers,” volunteers from Buddhist associations who cruise around the city collecting the bodies of people who have died violently. They put the pieces together and perform the appropriate rites so that the souls may depart in peace, and not hang about playing tricks on the living.